Damaged buildings in Grbavica during the Siege of Sarajevo. Image Wikipedia.

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. On December 14,1995 leaders from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and the former Yugoslavia signed the Dayton Peace Agreement, ending a ferocious three-and-a-half-year war that claimed around 100,000 lives, left thousands missing, and reduced entire communities to rubble.

But the war in Bosnia did not begin with bombs or snipers. It began with cruelty and dehumanization, with the deliberate turning of neighbors against neighbors.

Over the last few weeks to mark the impending anniversary of Dayton, social media is filled with images and videos recalling the horrors of that war. More disturbingly, recent reporting has revealed that some tourists came to Sarajevo and other cities not as witnesses, but as participants, joining sniper attacks against Bosniaks ( Bosnian Muslims) for sport. These are not grotesque curiosities from the past. They are warnings. Violence does not erupt spontaneously. It is cultivated, normalized, and enabled when dehumanization hardens into practice.

Having lived and worked in Bosnia and Herzegovina for six years, I have seen this reality up close. I lived in an apartment building where chunks of the facade were still missing from sniper fire, silent reminders embedded into everyday life. I walked streets scarred by shelling, listened to survivors carry grief that never fully leaves, and witnessed the enduring physical and psychological toll the war continues to exact.

Maybe it is cheeky to use this moment, and I will take the criticism. Dehumanization and cruelty never end well. Ever. History makes that clear, yet its warnings are lost in the noise of daily chaos. What once shocked us or was unacceptable now barely registers and is casually shrugged off. Cruelty becomes banal. Dehumanization becomes routine.........

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